Remember these? There was a time when the only way you could really share photos with someone was to make double prints and put them in the mail. Well, thanks to digital cameras, the only thing I have to put in old shoe boxes is, well, old shoes.

Hi. I’m Dave Johnson, a writer on the Windows team at Microsoft, and today, I’m going to show you some cool tricks for sending and receiving digital photos in e‑mail.

I like to organize my pictures with Windows Photos Gallery, so this is where I go to select pictures to send in an e‑mail.

I tag all my photos, which makes it really easy to locate them in a hurry. Marking photos with an identifiable label—called a tag—makes them easy to sort and find. I’ll click the Flowers tag because I want to see only my pictures of flowers.

I'll choose these photos to send. Now click e‑mail, and you’ll see this window, which is offering to resize your photos for the trip across cyberspace. Don’t worry—it’s only going to resize copies of your photos, not the originals.

You can see that you have several choices—from the photo’s original size all the way down to 640 by 480 pixels. Here’s why you have these choices: Full size photos from today’s digital cameras are huge, and sending several of them in an e‑mail message can fill your recipient’s inbox, or worse, it won't make it there at all because of file size limitations in e‑mail systems. Notice how if I attach them to my e‑mail message at their full size, the file attachment will be about 8.3 megabytes, which is really big. A good rule of thumb is to keep your e‑mail attachments less than 2 megabytes. Notice how the files size changes if I pick the smallest option.

Since I’m only sending these photos as snapshots to be viewed on the computer screen, I’ll pick "medium," which looks good on screen, and the photos will be about 460 kilobytes. That's plenty small enough for e‑mail.
You can see that the photos are automatically resized and then added as attachments to whatever e‑mail program you usually use. Just enter an e‑mail address, enter your message, and send it.

When I send a lot of photos at once, I tend to pick the smallest size. But if my friend had wanted to print these photos, I’d send them one at a time at their original size instead.

So that’s how to send photos in e‑mail. But what happens when you get an e‑mail that has photos in it? Well my dad, for example, tends to keep all of his pictures in the original messages in Windows Mail, but that’s not very convenient.

Check this out. If someone sends you a large photo, you can’t see the whole thing in the message preview window. To see the photo the way it was intended, you can double click it, and the photo opens in a Photo Gallery, sized correctly for your screen.

And don’t just leave all your photos in your e‑mail program. They’ll be forgotten there, the same as if you put them in a shoe box under your bed. Save the photos to your Pictures folder, where you can view, print, and share them more easily. You can add tags to the photos, they’ll be easy to find and organize, and as an added bonus, you can delete the e‑mail if you want to, since you’ve already saved the pictures.

Now that you know a better way to send photos in e‑mail, don’t keep it a secret. Let your friends know how to resize their pictures—your e‑mail program will spend less time downloading your e‑mail, and your inbox will thank you!